Well, yeah.

I disagree. The de facto standards trail the real ones by a large margin.

That is because the de facto standards are to a large extent determined by the oldest browser in use. Until very recently IE 6, which was released in 2001, and it didn't comply with the existing standards in force back then. Google and Facebook only just stopped supporting it.

This "the browsers must change because the web is changing" thing is a complete furphy. Certainly the web is changing. But that is because people are writing millions of millions of lines of javascript as they figure out how to use this "new" platform. But just because the stuff we build on top of the underlying platform changing at a dizzying rate doesn't mean the platform itself must be changing. On the contrary, it hasn't, until now with HTML5. Inventing new ways to do web pages no more depends on HTML/javascript change than the advancement of the linux kernel depends on gcc changing.